April 1, 2014

The tireless PISA folks are back with the results of a test of math-related real world problem solving among 15 year olds in 44 upscale countries. (Check here for sample questions like how to find the quickest route on a map or how to adjust an air conditioner). The U.S. did not bad, scoring a little above the average for rich countries, but not as good as the Asians or the white countries with smart immigration policies (Canada, Australia, Finland).

OECD
average

500

Singapore

562

Korea

561

Japan

552

Macao-China

540

Hong Kong-China

540

Shanghai-China

536

Chinese Taipei

534

Canada

526

Australia

523

Finland

523

England (United Kingdom)

517

Estonia

515

France

511

Netherlands

511

Italy

510

Czech Republic

509

Germany

509

United States

508

Belgium

508

Austria

506

Norway

503

Ireland

498

Denmark

497

Portugal

494

Sweden

491

Russian Federation

489

Slovak Republic

483

Poland

481

Spain

477

Slovenia

476

Serbia

473

Croatia

466

Hungary

459

Turkey

454

Israel

454

Chile

448

Cyprus 1,
2

445

Brazil

428

Malaysia

422

United Arab Emirates

411

Montenegro

407

Uruguay

403

Bulgaria

402

Colombia

399

Shanghai came down to earth after its stratospheric scores on the last two PISAs. Poland was also down v. its PISA scores. Otherwise, there would appear to be a fairly high degree of correlation at the national level between the triennial PISA test of book smarts and the new PISA test of real world smarts, which is what the g Factor theory of intelligence would predict.

You have five ravenous dogs to feed and three undesirable uncles weighing 175, 165 and 167 pounds. Assuming all dogs eat at the same rate, how many pounds of protein does each dog consume? The BMI of each uncle is 23. (Consult physiological chart accompanying test for fat to protein ratio of human body.)

Dennis Rodman has brought three DVDs to watch and four blunts. If the four blunts take five minutes to burn.... Etc

I don't know that I'd call Canada's immigration policy smart. We let in a lot of Jamaicans, Filipinos and Somalis, though thankfully the government stopped the Gypsy "refugees". Smart would be sending immigration officers to the convocation ceremonies of the various IIT's, and similarly prestigious universities in China and Russia, and just sign people up right then and there. We should also be targeting smart people in some of the more poorly governed European countries, because we know they'll integrate. Far too many hyphenated Canadians, even ones who were born here, want nothing to do with whites, except to make money off them.

The funny thing about multiculturalism in Canada is that the people whom it's actually supposed to appeal (visible minorities + Scots-Irish) are the ones that do their best to avoid interacting with other cultures in any meaningful way. When Europeans immigrated to Canada, there were ethnic ghettos in the cities, and then as people grew richer and moved out in the suburbs, everyone mixed. With more recent immigrants, it's the opposite. A lot of the least-desirable neighbourhoods in Toronto are quite diverse and filled with recent immigrants, but as they rise up the latter, they generally seek to move into the ethnically segregated suburbs.

A truly smart policy would be something as close to zero as possible, with the handful (and I mean handful.E.g., for the USA, say, well under 100,000 a year)of immigrants allowed in being limited to people who would actually benefit society as a whole, not just agro-business fat cats looking for people to pick grapes and internet billionaires who want Indians to write code for next to nothing.

Check here for sample questions like how to find the quickest route on a map or how to adjust an air conditioner

I took a look at the questions. I wonder if they're the best questions for assessing this. The kids in the higher scoring countries with lots of public infrastructure and gadgets like air conditioning are going to have experience dealing with maps and air conditioner controls. It's going to be a lot more challenging for someone from a rural, less developed country to deal with maps or gadget controls, even controlling for intelligence.

2/ Still don't like the fact that only urban China (and especially the top urban areas) are represented (and of course Singapore is 100% urban). Yes I know that Shanghai is more populous than many countries.

3/ I'd like to know what percentage of each country's population is made up of teenagers, or specifically 15-year -olds.

Would it be fair to characterize PISA as a test that gauges the ability of average modern people to do average modern things?

I wonder if the country standings in PISA would be drastically different or at all different if PISA was a highly abstract test for the prodigiously intelligent. I get the feeling that the Asian countries that top PISA wouldn't rank as highly.

"I wonder if the country standings in PISA would be drastically different or at all different if PISA was a highly abstract test for the prodigiously intelligent."

The PISA reports come with enormous amounts of documentation on the results. You can look up how the smartest students in each country did on the hardest questions. Maybe there is something interesting there, but mostly it seems like g dominates the results.

PISA uses a version of "item response theory" in which results for each question are analyzed in enormous detail. So, their tests are an outstanding resource for testing theories about different flavors of intelligence by nationality because you can look at how different countries perform on every single question.

I haven't datamined the results looking for anomalies, but I have casually looked at a lot of PISA numbers over the years looking for anomalies. In general, the g factor model of general intelligence seems congruent with most of what I've seen.

We have the biggest native/immigrant gap in Europe. Finland has fewer immigrants than most European countries thanks to more restriction on numbers and that may be a smart choice but conversely there's little selection of immigrants and that has not been a smart choice. A high proportion of immigrants have been refugees from Somalia and the like and it's, eh, uh, not working out.

I really don't foresee us changing to smart selection, either. I've tried advocating the Canadian point system and it's impossible - you instantly get called a Nazi, racist, fascist etc. The confusion when I explain that it's the Canadian system is remarkable but it nearly always leads to the conclusion that the Finn and especially the Swede upgrades their evaluation of Canada from "possibly the one good English speaking country" to "Nazi fascist racist state like AmeriKKKa".

Finland is not a wonderland of realistic immigration policy, just a very risk-averse (not to mention Russian-averse) political culture that tends to let Swedes do the social experimenting first and then jump in. Unfortunately the Swedish elite and media has been telling ours that multiculturalism is working great and we're heading that way now.

Winners and losers from the British Isles went to Australia. Australia has a very clever elite and a pronounced white underclass. Recently they've added educated East Asians and the South African professional class. The smart policies will not last. The usual suspects are doing their best to undermine 200+ years of hard work by the other usual suspects.

"Singapore's population is only 75 percent Chinese, and yet its results are higher than China.

Is Singapore telling some citizens to stay home on the day of the test?

goatweed"

Singapore and Australia are the two countries whose immigrants have higher IQs than the natives. Alot of Singapore's immigrants are high-IQ Indians. It's a country that wants smart, educated people.

Lee Kuan Yew was a believer in HBD before everyone else was and he's written about it, but he also wasn't a Chinese nationalist. He didn't allow low quality ethnic Chinese into Singapore. His immigration policy was geared to bringing in smart people, which he realized would be alot of Chinese and upper Indians and whites. Singapore has a blatantly HBD aware immigration policy.

Any country of whites, Jews, upper-caste Indians and East Asians is going to be high achieving and cultured, given they have a modern form of government. I'd imagine if the US had Chinese and Indians as it's two major minority groups, there would be no talk about US's struggling economy, government liabilities, or global competitiveness. However, those are the two countries we restrict immigration from, due to our hard cap per country. We have a blatant anti-Chinese and upper Indian immigration policy. We're the anti-Singapore.

"Lee states that his views are a result of observation, empirical enquiry, and study. 'I started off believing all men are equal. Now I know that's the most unlikely thing to have ever been...' Commenting on the controversial Murray and Bernstein [sic] book, he opined 'the Bell Curve is a fact of life.' He states that the relevance of the Bell Curve became obvious to him by the late 1960s when he could see that equal opportunity did not bring about equal results."- Lee Kuan Yew

Oh please, it goes way beyond Whiskey. I recommend using it to refer to them as much as possible in any context in which it fits. For example, "You know, the Scots-Irish really have an outsized influence on the Supreme Court. Look at Elena Kagan, she's always favoring the Scots-Irish." They then tell you she's not Scots-Irish (unless they're totally clueless, but then that's okay, because they'll think they know something about the world and perpetuate the Scots-Irish meme anyway). You can say "Oh, isn't she? I could have sworn she was. What is she then?" If they know, they'll say it. Then you can say "But that's impossible. We know that Jews are powerless in America. How did you know she's Jewish anyway? Have you been poking into her background? What are you, some kind of an anti-Semite? Geezus." Follow me?

The thing is, compared to America's immigration policy virtually any other immigration policy is "smart." In absolute terms, however, at this point in time, with the demographic blow that has already been dealt, the only smart immigration policy is a policy of no immigration. Naturally this appalls the Asian supremacists and the broader anti-white coalition, but why care what they want?

" I'd imagine if the US had Chinese and Indians as it's two major minority groups, there would be no talk about US's struggling economy, government liabilities, or global competitiveness." - You'd be surprised. Aren't several californian cities on the brink of bankruptcy in the 70% white and asian category?

To Anonymous at 2:25am, you are totally right. We need more Lee Kuan Yews in this world because there are too many leftist feminist liberal IQ-deniers on one side and too many fascist ethnonationalists on the other side. I support meritocracy.

Huge numbers of them in Arhus and Copenhagen, Malmo, might as well be Denmark too. There is no passport control on the bridge between Scania and Seeland. They have an underclass of Eskimos who cannot cope.

Here's the thing about the Danes. They can build. Almost all of them. So this test is a shock. It must include the refuse from Greenland.

"there are too many leftist feminist liberal IQ-deniers on one side and too many fascist ethnonationalists on the other side."

You can get all the benefits of high IQ immigration and more through a solid eugenics program and you don't need to irreparably damage your society's racial fabric to do it. Furthermore, this is a strategy that all countries can employ, whereas immigrationism requires some countries to lose if others are to win. None of this equates to fascistic ethnonationalism, though with the smashing success of Nazis-are-going-to-kill-us-all scaremongering you are not a fool to attempt this association.

You can get all the benefits of high IQ immigration and more through a solid eugenics program and you don't need to irreparably damage your society's racial fabric to do it. Furthermore, this is a strategy that all countries can employ, whereas immigrationism requires some countries to lose if others are to win. None of this equates to fascistic ethnonationalism, though with the smashing success of Nazis-are-going-to-kill-us-all scaremongering you are not a fool to attempt this association.

Exactly. You just need a eugenic culture - culture in the original sense of "cultivation" i.e. culivating virtues like intelligence, responsibility.

But this is exactly why eugenics are so fervently opposed by Jews. Jews have been in diaspora for so long and have become dependent on occupying elite niches among non-Jewish peoples for so long that native elites and eugenic cultures for cultivating native elites are competition and a threat to them.

A eugenic culture in which eugenic values were part of the air people breathed would be wonderful. A fear that many have, however, is that such a culture would necessarily be a living hell for genetic "have nots." Those fears must be convincingly laid to rest for any eugenic culture to have chance to blossom.

The following youtube is a condensation of the life of one of the participants, Neil, in Michael Apted's long-run "Seven Up" documentary series. At the 19:22 mark he talks about his decision to forgo children. He is clearly an intelligent man, but he is suffering from some form of slight mental illness and he understands that by procreating he runs the risk of passing his condition onto his progeny. I was touched by his humility here and his attitude helped confirm my belief that the level of coercion a society would require to urge people to make eugenic decisions is exaggerated by opponents. Neil made such a decision of his own volition. Many other people are likely in a similar position but sitting on the fence, undecided. Surely one would not need to move financial heaven and earth to provide them with an incentive to decide eugenically.

As regards specifically Jewish fears, that is an interesting hypothesis. If it is true then it surely stems from a time in which the size of the economic pie was considered fixed. Such attitudes are unwarranted in an age which understands the role of human capital in expanding that pie.

As regards specifically Jewish fears, that is an interesting hypothesis. If it is true then it surely stems from a time in which the size of the economic pie was considered fixed. Such attitudes are unwarranted in an age which understands the role of human capital in expanding that pie.

The elite niches that Jews tend to gravitate to are fixed in any given society.

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